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    Sweet Caress
    Sweet Caress
    Sweet Caress
    Audiobook15 hours

    Sweet Caress

    Written by William Boyd

    Narrated by Susan Lyons

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Born into Edwardian England, Amory's first memory is of her father standing on his head. She has memories of him returning on leave during the First World War. But his absences, both actual and emotional, are what she chiefly remembers. It is her photographer uncle Greville who supplies the emotional bond she needs, who, when he gives her a camera and some rudimentary lessons in photography, unleashes a passion that will irrevocably shape her future.A spell at boarding school ends abruptly and Amory begins an apprenticeship with Greville in London, photographing socialites for the magazine Beau Monde. But Amory is hungry for more and her search for life, love, and artistic expression will take her to the demi monde of Berlin of the late '20s, to New York of the '30s, to the blackshirt riots in London, and to France in the Second World War where she becomes one of the first women war photographers. Her desire for experience will lead Amory to further wars, to lovers, husbands, and children as she continues to pursue her dreams and battle her demons. In this enthralling story of a life fully lived, illustrated with "found" period photographs, William Boyd has created a sweeping panorama of some of the most defining moments of modern history, told through the camera lens of one unforgettable woman, Amory Clay. It is his greatest achievement to date. Reviews "One of the very best prose stylists and storytellers in the English language." (The Atlantic) "Superbly written . . . One of the most smoothly readable novels of the year." (Chicago Tribune on Restless) "Its pleasures are countless . . . Supremely entertaining." (Washington Post Book World on Any Human Heart) "Few contemporary writers are able to evoke the ambiance and drama of our recent past as forcefully as Boyd . . . And [his] characters are as beguiling as his prose." (Washington Post Book World on Waiting for Sunrise) Entertaining and seemingly effortless in their fluency, [Boyd's] novels conceal insights into human behavior that are more intricate than may first appear. (Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review, on Waiting for Sunrise) About the Author William Boyd is the author of eleven novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; Waiting for Sunrise; and, most recently, Solo: A James Bond Novel. William Boyd lives in London and France. www.williamboyd.co.uk
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 15, 2015
    ISBN9781490699332
    Author

    William Boyd

    William Boyd is also the author of A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys War Prize and short-listed for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; Ordinary Thunderstorms; and Waiting for Sunrise, among other books. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Sweet Caress

    4/5

    158 ratings22 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Once I got over the idea that the author had used 'found' photos of random people to illustrate this story about a war photographer, I enjoyed this book. I should recommend this for bookclub; much to discuss about Amory's life, loves and historical moments she captures on film.
    • 5/5
      A walk through the colourful life of Amory Clay. She is a professional photographer and an early assignment has her investigating the decadent, colourful, sexually liberated Berlin clubs of the early 1930s. There are passing glimpses of a future facist Germany that will soon spread its evil tentacles over an unsuspecting and sleepy world.Back in London hosting an exhibition of her own work Amory is intrigued by the rise of Oswald Mosley and his facist followers identified and condemned by their famous black shirts. An unexpected and violent event occurs that changes Amory’s direction and focus.Through a number of casual sexual encounters she marries a soldier of the 2ndWW, a man deeply affected by his experiences resulting in an irreversible and permanent blackness with an inevitable sad conclusion. For a limited time she resides in New York until the disastrous American involvement in Vietnam demands her photographic skills.William Boyd has a wonderful storytelling technique. He takes a life, an interesting life, and highlights the pivotal moments in that life, decisions taken, choices made, and consequences that followed. We are entertained, we are educated, we are party to the changing face of Germany, the slaughter of WW2 and the catastrophic decisions and campaigns that were the killing fields of Vietnam.
    • 4/5
      Amory relates the story of her life, straddling as it does the twentieth century, from the First World War to the eighties.Her father is mentally damaged from the First World War. Broad-minded Amory becomes a photographer, which allows her to travel the world from ‘30s Berlin, to war-torn Europe, to Vietnam. And the text is interspersed with found photos, adding a nice touch.But I found Amory had such a modern voice that I couldn’t really believe I was reading a ‘true’ history. The past was a different place but I felt as though the modern character was parachuted into these vivid moments of the last century rather than being a changing product of them.
    • 5/5
      Compelling, engrossing, captivating, beguiling
    • 4/5
      Amory Clay is a fictional woman professional photographer in the tumultuous 20th century. Born in 1908, coming of age in the 1920s, living through the depression, WWII, and Vietnam, photographing the times. From her retirement she looks back over her life, interweaving personal events with her documentation of world events.

      Boyd enjoys blurring the lines of the real and fiction. The pages are sprinkled with real photos from the collection of the author, but which illustrate the story, giving faces to characters and character to events. Even the epigraph is attributed to a fictional character:

      "However long your stay on this small planet lasts, and whatever happens during it, the most important thing is that - from time to time - you feel life's sweet caress."

      I enjoyed reading this book. Amory was, in many ways, an average person - not particularly famous in her profession, but quite competent. She experienced life's ups and downs, but felt some sweet caresses, too.
    • 5/5
      Beeindruckende fiktive Lebensgeschichte der Fotografin Amory Clay, verwobenen mit tatsächlichen geschichtlichen Ereignissen. Spannt einen breiten Bogen vom England des Jahres 1908 über die wilden 30er in Berlin, die Zwischenkriegs- und Kriegszeit in New York und Frankreich, den Vietnamkrieg bis ins Schottland des Jahres 1978.
    • 2/5
      This book annoyed me because at first I thought it was a novel based on a real woman. It read as if the author had done some research and fictionalized a life. When I found out that it was a work of pure fiction I was surprised because Boyd wrote about things happening to this woman that , to me, were so silly that unless they were true I cannot imagine why any writer would include them. There were photographs included, which apparently the author just found and seemingly wrote his story "around". The whole thing felt like a writing assignment (take 20 photos and write a story connecting them) or an improve skit. The story just did not hold together and seemed incredible - if all of the things that happened to Armory really happened to one woman - well that would be a great work of non-fiction, but in this case the events in Armory's life just felt random. In the end I did not really feel she was a fully actualized character, nor did I like or admire her.
    • 4/5
      Auch wenn William Boyd viel daran setzt, es anders aussehen zu lassen: Trotz der zahlreicehn Bilder und der detaillierten bografischen Daten bleibt Amory Clay eine Romanfigur. Die vom Autor geschaffene Pseudo-Authentizität hat aber jedenfalls ihhren Reiz. Und es stimmt: Hier werden wirklich viele Leben der Protagonistin erzählt, die sich - nachdem es ihr Vater nicht geschafft hat, sie in einem See zu ertränken - durch zwei Kriege des 20. Jahrhunderts fotografiert. Was nicht von ungefähr kommt, immerhin hatte ihr Vater mehr als eine Psychose aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg davongetragen. Amory wechselt die Kriegsschauplätze wie ihr Liebhaber: Immer impulsiv, immer mit vollem Einsatz, immer mit völliger Hingabe. Danach fällt ihr noch zu, einen familiären Kampf auszutragen, von dem nicht sicher ist, ob sie ihn gewinnen konnte. Das Ende rührt. Und lässt den Leser mit seinen eigenen Gedanken zurück. Ein ambivalentes Buch, von dem nicht klar ist, ob es klug ist, eine Leseempfehlung abzugeben.
    • 3/5
      The story of a woman who repeatedly defies social morays and finds herself photographing her way through history .
    • 5/5
      Excellent story telling focusing on the life of Amory Clay, a female photographer. Engrossing from beginning to end.
    • 2/5
      William Boyd is another author that is often recommended to me but that I can't warm to. Not that I dislike his books. On the contrary, I'm often intrigued by his themes and by his writing. I just don't seem to be able to derive any satisfaction out of reading them.

      Sweet Caress is a prime example of this dilemma:
      The story follows the life of Amory Clay, a woman who in her youth defies the advice of her parents and sets out to become a photographer. Soon thrown into the throng of the roaring twenties and early thirties, she lives a life that is similar to some of the real life individuals that I love to read about.

      And that is just it - I love reading biographies and stories involving the real personalities, and I just can't get my head around why I would want to read a fictional account that involves characters that are somehow based on but are not - not even fictional versions of - the actual individuals of the time.

      Why include fictional characters that resemble Anita Berber and Marianne Breslauer, when they could actually be included as characters? I mean, I get that disguising real people as fictional characters is useful, even necessary, to offend contemporaries of the author, but this is hardly the case here.
      After that I lost interest and skim read to the end.

      This is just another case where I'd prefer a non-fiction book about the era to a literary attempt at historical fiction.
    • 4/5
      There are many things that I admire and respect about William Boyd's fiction. He knows how to develop characters, keep action going, build suspense, and he builds images with words, sometimes so poetically it takes your breath away. His metaphors can be interesting because they are so unusual ('like a boxer who just received bad news') and his characters can have some genuinely endearing characteristics (summarise a person in four adjectives). He's clearly enamoured with fictional autobiographies and he is able (in many of them) to take on a whole persona and give them a life story. The pictures. While I understand what critics say about the photos being amateurish and distracting, not professional enough for a professional photographer, it is at least an attempt to add something to the narrative about the process of seeing. It also introduces that mystic quality of chance, of finding the pictures and then weaving the story around them. He's not the first to do this, nor the last. Orhan Pamuk does it and adds objects owned by his characters. They do add something to the narrative in Pamuk's case, I think in part, because he has an eye for it, was a photographer before he became a writer. But Boyd's attempt falls short of what it might have been. For one, there is too much of it. Less would have been more and selecting more enigmatic photos would have been better in showing the developing artistic vision of Amory. Avoid trying to show us the end product of an award winning professional photographer if you are trying to avoid liability but you can show us developing ideas in found photography if you have an eye for it. Boyd fails to give us any sense of her ideas, any real identity and that is the problem. As it is there was the struggling young photographer with a few stabs at some ideas (absences, for example) but it was hardly developed in a meaningful way. Boyd is a master of written language but not so masterful with photographic language. It bogs down his rolling narrative that already so competently puts interesting pictures in our minds.other things that bothered me:1. I found the excessive and constant description of drinks and drinking and smoking cigarettes a rather tired cliche that got me screaming by the end. ENough already. There are better ways to introduce a scene.This was a crutch I'd have liked to see a competent writer avoid. It irritated after about the fiftieth time.2. Like others, I too found the Vietnam section not believable and muddled. Granted a professional woman's return to her career after a long stint away could well have been interesting, but wild success in a year in a place with so much chaos didn't seem realistic. Logistics were overlooked and unconvincing. Again the pictures were not worth a thousand well chosen words. 3. What I find hard to like about this story and others I've read by Boyd is the sort of dewey eyed admiration of characters that are made to seem admirable for their broken childhoods, heavy smoking and drinking, casual sexcapades and disconnectedness. It not only doesn't seem unique, it seems immature and it's hard to find something plucky or admirable about it. I kept waiting for something I could admire about Amory. I kept wishing this character would quit moaning about doing what her Uncle told her to do, about taking one job after another from former lovers and then being swept off her feet by a rakish (but rich) Scottish Laird destined to drink himself to death (another very tired cliche). I didn't find Amory a very independent thinker and in her entire career she didn't seem to have any ideas in her picture taking, nor did she show much interest in any other photographers. I found her more interesting as a male author's idea of what a woman's life might have been like in this life time of war if she could be made into a male stereotype that flits around and samples history, but not much in the way of the inner life of an interesting woman.
    • 4/5
      Sweet Caress - Life, full and unadulteratedSweet Caress is a fictional autobiography of a woman who lived an interesting life during tumultuous times. Amory Clay was born in 1908 in England and died in 1983 and so experienced or was at least affected by two world wars, the great depression, the War in Vietnam and the social and sexual revolution of the sixties.As a professional photographer Amory chronicles the changing times giving author William Boyd the opportunity to place her in the middle of the action which enhances the interesting and complicated personal life of his protagonist.And interesting it is. Her career includes photographing members of high society in London to taking candid shots of the underside of pre-World War II Berlin. She's in New York shooting fashion then back to London working for a news magazine. She's on the front lines in Europe in 1944 and in Vietnam in 1967.During that time she has an affair with her married boss, a relationship with a French writer, marries a Scottish Lord and has twin daughters.Sweet Caress is about life - full and unadulterated. Love, heartbreak, birth, death, motherhood, family - it's a rich mix and Boyd keeps the narrative moving hitting the highs and lows, the successes and failures all the while giving us the insights of his remarkable heroine. His writing is seamless and precise, the characters complicated and appealing, the settings vivid.Boyd is able to capture the uncertainty of life, how events and other people shape our destiny as much or more than we consciously do ourselves. How seemingly chance meetings and random acts chart our lives. How man plans and God laughs.Boyd has interspersed photographs and captions throughout this book perhaps to give the reader the experience of reading a journal. However I found these pictures unnecessary. Rather than enhancing the novel they proved disconcerting for two reasons. I create my own image of the characters I'm reading about. Suddenly seeing them in black and white and having them look nothing like I imagined was off-putting. The second reason is the photographs are very amateur and of poor quality in concept and execution - hardy the work of a professional which, for me, eroded Amory's credibility. It was a good idea that didn't work.
    • 5/5
      Sweeping novel about a female professional photographer. Perhaps a bit too sweeping. I liked it a lot, right up to the part about Viet Nam. Library book.
    • 4/5
      Amory Clay was born in 1908, a decade before the Great War. Her father is damaged in this war and he nearly takes his daughter with him, on his downward spiral. Her uncle teaches, Amory, the art of photography, as a young woman and we get to follow her through the years, as she documents her life in photos and in later years, as journal entries.As a working photographer, she finds herself, immersed, in many historical moments: she is beaten by fascist blackshirts, she witness’s atrocities in France, during WWII, she visits the steamy jungles of Vietnam and finds herself searching for her wayward daughter in a hippie commune in Northern California.This is Any Human Heart, from a female perspective. The writing is not as strong as that fine novel but the prose is easy and swift and there are many points of interest, along the way. There are also “fake” photographs, highlighting the narrative, which I found, hit or miss. A good read.
    • 3/5
      Sweet Caress is impressive in its way, in its scope, its feeling of authenticity, and its interwoven threads, but I'm sorry to say that it just didn't move me very much. The main character, Amory Clay, never seemed real to me, and so I didn't greatly care what happened to her. I put the book aside for a couple of days and didn't miss it, but I came back and finished it anyway just because I hoped for more before the end. Instead, the whole last portion just seemed out of joint to me, as if the narrative had wandered from its roadmap and couldn't find its way back in time.I greatly enjoyed Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms and Waiting for Sunrise, but this one didn't touch me as those did.
    • 4/5
      This book was so realistic (chock-full of historic people and places) that I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading a novel rather than a memoir. Mr. Boyd writes the believable story of an English woman born in 1908 who is a bit precocious and goes through some unusual experiences both with her dysfunctional family and her early life. She becomes a photographer and experiences both WWII and The Vietnam War through her assignments.The book covers her life and is written as if she is relating it to you. Actual photographs that the author collected are interspersed throughout and were the inspiration for the novel. The effect is to make her story come alive not only on the pages, but also in the mind of the reader. I found it a most enjoyable and all encapsulating read.
    • 4/5
      If written by any other writer this would simply count as a well written, engaging novel. But for William Boyd it feels a little like he's produced a cover version of the New Confessions but failed to include the magic ingredients. Like the New Confessions (and Any Human Heart) the novel looks back over the lead character's life (a woman this time) through the 20th Century. There are the familiar Boyd themes of a disjointed childhood, and strong attractions but ultimately unsuccessful relationships. There are regular Boyd locations, 1920s Berlin and 1930s America. But somehow this doesn't draw you in like the earlier novels.It's good, but not great.
    • 4/5
      Wow. I don’t know any other author who could have pulled off this book so beautifully. Boyd does the fake autobiography so well that you can fool yourself into thinking his characters are real. Amory Clay felt authentic to me (except she was an awfully sloppy photographer) and her voice was honest and pulled no punches. She didn’t glamorize her past nor did she try to martyr herself on her poor decisions. In the end she admits that her life was interesting because of the many mistakes she made. Indeed, if she’d done the easy thing or just had better luck her life would have been pretty dull.Because I read and loved Any Human Heart which is a similar novel in the sense that it’s a journal of one person’s life, I couldn’t help compare the two. Amory doesn’t have so many brushes with greatness as Logan had, but she had very personal experiences with monumental events; mostly wars, WWII and Vietnam. She’s relating her story in the present with journal entries that morph seamlessly into vignettes from her entire life, starting with early childhood and her difficult relationship with her mother and ending with her mostly solitary life on a Scottish island. Each slice of her life is delivered with polish and complete recall. As in all lives there are highs and lows, and at one point I had to stop the audiobook because I was too tense about her predicament and needed a break. A lot of reviews talk about Boyd’s portrayal of Amory as a woman and are critical just as many were with Brazzaville Beach. I didn’t have an issue with BB, but I did with Restless where I felt the feminine qualities of both lead characters were superficial; that except for the occasional mention of lipstick, the story could have been of father and son rather than mother and daughter. Amory’s character feels more naturally female to me. She’s a human who happens to be female rather than just a caricature or a wish-fulfillment vehicle. She embraces her independence, but doesn’t make a cause out of it. She mourns her apparent infertility, but doesn’t let it consume her. She has an active sex life, but isn’t promiscuous. She is driven and ambitious, but accepts her defeats with grace. I liked her a lot and was especially appreciative of her circumspect attitude at the end. I would have been sad at her demise, but since it comes to all of us, it wasn’t a tragedy.
    • 4/5
      First of all, this is the second Boyd book I have read the first being Any Human Heart. Which I loved. This book was very good but maybe not in the same league as AHH. It is hard not to compare with The Race to Paris since the subject matter is relatively similar. Unlike Race, this book is a sprawling epic that gives us an unforgettable character in Amory Boyd, a fictional Margaret Bourke-White type. I loved her and all her many lives. Wm. Boyd does what I consider a formidble task for any male writer to be able to capture a woman's essence. So many writers tend to shade women as they would like us to be. Who better to know how a woman should act than a man.So she is a fabulously talented photographer taught by her uncle. As she ages into her late 50's she heads off to Viet Nam to cover the war around 1967 to 1968. "What am I doing here?" She asks herself. I know....I understand what it feels like to need excitement in one's life if only to remind yourself that you are still alive.Would recommend to anyone. Fascinating study of a life well lived.
    • 5/5
      William Boyd is one of my favorite writers. For me, any new book by Boyd is a cause for celebration, a good reason to drop everything and schedule a few long days with nothing else to do but enjoy it. So, that’s exactly what I set out to do, but “Sweet Caress” took far longer for me to read than most of his books. This book wasn’t a complex character-driven literary mystery, nor was it a nail-biting suspense-filled thriller; this was a fictionalized literary memoir covering the greater part of a century. The main character, Amory Clay, an independent, attractive, professional photographer, led a complex and complicated life that brought her face-to-face with many of the key moments of 20th century history.Amory’s life journey (from 1908 to 1983)—whether motivated by affairs of the heart or necessitated by a fascinating set of career challenges—takes her from London to Berlin, back to London, across the Atlantic to New York, back to London, on to Paris, then to the German WWII front lines, back to Paris, to the French countryside near Bordeaux, back to London, to the west coast of Scotland, many trips back and forth to London and Edinburgh, to Vietnam (during the war), back to Scotland, to Southern California and back to Scotland a few times, and finally back to Scotland to the small island of Barrendale (in reality a peninsula), off the far northeastern coast. I could tell you a bit about what motivates Amory to make these abrupt changes in location, but I don’t think it would help illuminate the literary merit of the book and it might lessen your enjoyment of the novel should you choose to read it. Perhaps it is enough to say that her life is complex and complicated…and like many women, much is motivated by her desire to live close to the men she loved.With Amory, Boyd creates a fully authentic human being. I find it nearly impossible to believe any reviewer who says that she or he found this character unbelievable. Especially women reviewers who says they find Amory not appropriately female enough. Rubbish! There is much about Amory that reminds me of many women I know (including me), all of us highly intelligent and independent. I’ll share one moment perhaps midway through the novel when Amory is visiting with her younger sister Dido, a concert pianist who travels the world and interacts with many famous musicians and conductors. Dido is also a devoted wife and mother of two children. The two sisters are in midlife when they have this conversation. They’re a little inebriated and the younger one brags to the older one that (so far) she’s made love to 53 different men. She asks Amory (who has a history of often risky behavior and an arrest record for obscene photography) how many men she’s slept with. Amory doesn’t tell her; she’s a bit ashamed at how few men fit this category in her life. But later that night she thinks about it and is amazed that her conservative younger sister has had more than 10 times the lovers she has had…and all the while, she’d thought she’d led the more risqué life! Toward the end of the novel, Amory sums up her own life with these jumbled words: it was “rich and intensely sad, fascinating, droll, absurd and terrifying—sometimes—and difficult and painful and happy.” But at the same time, she remarks that most lives are equally as complicated as hers had been. “Any life of any reasonable length throws up all manner of complications, just as intricate.” If there is a theme to this novel, it must be this: we all lead amazingly complex and emotionally rich lives. But it takes a sublime writer like William Boyd to illuminate an everyday complicated life like Amory’s and make it into an emotionally satisfying and intriguing literary journey. “Sweet Caress” is plainly and simply a sublime book! The title, no doubt, refers to the whole of a life, in this case, a sweet caress (despite it having been punctuated frequently by immense pain and suffering). When I finished the story of Amory Clay, I felt a profound sense of loss: there would be no more to the story of this intriguing woman. The book came wrapped in a marketing sleeve proclaiming: “The story of a woman / The story of a century / The novel of the year.” The first two are obviously correct; the last is pure hyperbole. This is certainly a masterful novel, but it will hardly be the “novel of the year.” I don’t even think it is one of Boyd’s best, but I am delighted that he wrote it and that I read it. I can imagine myself rereading this story sometime again in the distant future. I do that to all the outstanding books I savor. I envy you the experience you have before you to read it fresh for the first time.
    • 5/5
      This was the hundredth book I have read this year, and probably the finest book I have read so far this century. All too often recently I have looked forward to the latest book from a favourite author, only to be woefully disappointed when it finally arrives. I even felt a little trepidation after buying this book last week, though I really should have known better. William Boyd delivers in spades, as he always does.Over the years Boyd has shown great skill at creating fictional memoirs that read as convincingly as the genuine article. His two previous novels in that mode, the awesome 'Any Human Heart' and the sadly underrated 'The New Confessions', chronicled the lives of a failed novelist and a First World War veteran turned film director. Both were so finely crafted, featuring utterly plausible encounters with finely drawn historical figures, that it was difficult at times not to believe that they were genuine memoirs. Indeed, 'Any Human Heart' even included numerous footnotes (though never with the clumsiness that so often characterises Paul Auster's novels) and an index. I could all too readily believe in Logan Mounstuart, and I would have enjoyed reading his collected works.In 'Sweet Caress' Boyd has eclipsed even these two masterpieces. Amory Clay is born in 1908, the eldest daughter of Beverley Clay, another failed novelist (though without Logan Mountstuart's brio, self delusion or zest for life), and brought up in moderate affluence in a large house in Sussex. From an early age, guided by her uncle, she showed an interest, bordering on a passion, in photography. Photographs from different stages of her life adorn the book, further adding to the autobiographical verisimilitude. Her father has a difficult war, returning with what would nowadays readily be diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder; back then he was initially just left to get on with life as best he could.Boyd delivers the novel in what has almost become his trademark, with lengthy stretches of narrative covering the actions of the past, interspersed with reflections by the character as they look back on the various chapters of their life. This worked well in both 'Any Human Heart' and 'Restless', his slick redefinition of the spy novel, and suits this work admirably. Amory Clay faces a vast array of travails as she struggles to establish herself as a photographer, struggling to escape beyond the cloying world of popular magazines and photographs of socialites attending balls. The clarity with which she recalls her early difficulties are reminiscent of Eva's story in 'Restless'. We are taken to Berlin during the Weimar period, followed by a return to Britain during the late 19309s when she encounters the abortive rise of Oswald Mosley's Union of British Fascists, before she moves to America where she is still living when the Second World War breaks out. Partially to resolve an increasingly difficult personal life she returns to Europe to run a press agency for American magazines before succeeding in becoming accredited as a war photographer.Boyd writes beautifully. There is nothing flashy about his prose but he sucks the reader in, and before you know it you have got through sixty pages and don't want to put the book down even for a moment. The plausibility of all of his characters is flawless, and the story never loosens its grip on the reader. I found myself facing the eternal quandary set by a great book - my desperation to find out how the story ends was matched only by my disappointment at having now finished it, though I am pretty confident that I will be reading it again very soon.The final few pages, one of Amory Clay's reflective passages written in her cottage on a Scottish island, are among the most powerful I have ever read: chilling, tragic and painful, yet also tinged with hope. They reminded me of the last pages of Emily St John Mandel's 'Last Night in Montreal', though even more moving.